going through the motions

Understanding Economic Justice and Logic

You hire ten people for $10/hour. This means, the average wage is now $10/hour among your employees.

This seems too low to a some people who gain political control. So they make a law that forbids you from hiring anyone for less than $12.50/hour. You do the math and realize that you can probably make do with only eight employees if you are forced to do so, but you simply can’t afford to lose the extra, $25/hour.

So you fire two of your employees. This means that the average pay of your workers is now 25% higher than before. This is trumpeted in the news as a major government success story. When the rise in unemployment is reported, it is presented as a new problem to be solved by a comptent government, not the results of unjust government tyranny.

Injustice

You pay ten employees $10/hour but realize they don’t have time to do all the work. You think about hiring one more person, but then realize that the time is mostly consumed in tasks that don’t require skilled labor. So instead of hiring one person you higher two students who still live at home and didn’t graduate from High School for $5/hour (pretend we don’t have a minimum wage law that makes it illegal to hire people at that rate, forcing them to remain unemployed).

This means you are a harsh and unjust business. You are now paying 12 employees collectively $110/hour. That means the average pay per hour has gone from $10/hour to less than $9.17/hour. This fact is reported in the news media as if you have lowered the pay of all of your employees.

You are evil and are going to go to hell.

(In the meantime, with our present minimum wage laws, those non-graduates never get a job and never learn skills and opportunities that come from being employed. They are stuck at the bottom of the ladder with all the rungs they could reach kicked out from above them.)